Today I would like to announce the launch of the OMNINOGGIN plugin support forum. From now on, I would like all support questions regarding all of my WordPress plugins to go through the appropriate categories in the support forum. Here are my reasons for the shift:

Intense Debate comments are not searchable by the end user. It’s also hard to navigate the comments to find what you are looking for. Because of that, people end up asking the same questions.

Support plugins is starting to become a monumental task for me. I’m hoping that having a forum will encourage 3rd party paticipation to help reduce some of my time spent on plugin support. That way I can have some time to actually develop the plugins.

I need the ability to separate which support requests are important and which ones are not as important. To do that, I have created a set of free support forums and a set of premium support forums. Free forums are for people who are using my plugins for personal/non-commercial purposes (and thus would not need urgent support). Premium forums are for people who are using my plugins on blogs that are earning them money.

Some people were unhappy at my attempts to gain traffic from my plugins by displaying an OMNINOGGIN widget in the WordPress adminitration dashboard by default. The premium support forums will help justify the 20-30 hours I spend each week on my plugins, so I will be disabling these widgets by default on all of my plugins.

What is the difference between free support and premium support?

Premium forums will be identical to free forums except that I will not be monitoring free support forums as often as premium support forums. Also, there is no guarantee that your post will be responded to in free support forums.

How do I get access to premium support forums?

You can get access to premium support forums in any of the following ways:

If you have made a donation of at least $5 to any of my plugins prior to today, please contact me via the contact form on my about page. Make sure to specify your forum username and your Paypal email address, so that I can confirm the donation.

Purchase premium plugin support. You will have access to the premium forums immediately after purchase.

Contribute to the free forums. You will automatically have access to the premium forums after posting to the forums 50 times. Please also make sure to not spam, but instead post only relevant posts. I will ban you if I think you are a spammer.

Send me an email via the contact form on my about page and tell me why you deserve premium support access. I’m pretty reasonable provided that you are too :).

7 Responses to “Plugin Support Forum is Up!”

Ty, I just wanted to let you know that being a WordPress plugin developer myself, I still support your initial idea of adding a widget to the dashboard. For the average WordPress user it might be really hard to understand the enormous amount of time you devote to developing those plugins and the fact that the return on time invested is close to a few cents an hour.

And secondly — dashboard widget is only a dashboard widget — one can disable it in two clicks.

It would be really interesting to now how this support forum model works out for you.

I see you took my advice and went the premium support route. It's something I've been considering myself, though I haven't made a decision yet. I've also thought about just saying "send me bug reports, and other important requests by email, but keep customization requests to the WordPress.org forum."

I like how you've set things up though. It seems like it should work well.